Reef by Nora Roberts

Author:Nora Roberts [Roberts, Nora]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Piatkus Books

CHAPTER 16

IT WAS BLISSFULLY easy to fall back into the old routine. Tate found herself pushing the purpose of the voyage to the back of her mind and simply enjoying the ride. They left Hatteras Island behind on a bright spring morning with the seas at a light chop. The wind was just brisk enough for a jacket and she’d pulled her hair through the hole in the back of a Durham Bulls baseball cap. At her father’s insistence, she had first shift at the wheel. And took the Atlantic.

They sailed toward Ocracoke with its pirate ghosts, waving at passengers on a passing ferry as seagulls swooped and called in their wake. Then land became a shadow to the west, and there was only sea.

“How’s it feel, Skipper?” Ray slipped in behind her, hugging an arm over her shoulders.

“It feels good.” Tate lifted her face to the wind that rushed through the partially open windows of the bridge. “I guess I’ve been a passenger too long.”

“Sometimes your mother and I will hop aboard and sail to nowhere for a day or two. I’ve enjoyed that.” Eyes on the horizon, he sighed deeply. “But it sure feels good to be sailing to somewhere. I’ve been wanting this for a long time.”

“I guess I thought you’d put the Isabella, and all of it, pretty much behind you. I didn’t realize how much you still wanted her.”

“I didn’t either, really.” Out of habit, he checked the course. She, the boat and his daughter, was right on the mark. “After we lost the Marguerite, and you went off to college, I just drifted awhile. It seemed like the right thing to do. I felt so helpless about Buck. He and Matthew off in Chicago, and Buck just wouldn’t let me connect.”

“I know that hurt you,” she murmured. “You’d gotten so close that summer.”

“He lost a leg. I lost a friend. All of us lost a fortune. Neither Buck nor I handled it very well.”

“You did the best you could,” Tate corrected. She had lost her heart, she thought, and she, too, had done the best she could.

“I never knew what to say, or what to do. Sometimes I’d pop one of the videos your mother had taken during those months—watch and remember. It got easier to just drop a letter in the mail now and again. Matthew never let on how bad it was. We might never have found out if we hadn’t taken a trip to Florida and gone by the trailer.”

He shook his head, remembering what a shock it had been to see his friend drunk, stumbling around a filthy trailer, surrounded by trash, covered in shame.

“The boy should have told us what a bind he was in.”

“Matthew?” She glanced back in surprise. “It sounds to me as if Buck was the one in trouble. Matthew should have stayed and taken care of him.”

“If he’d stayed, he couldn’t have taken care of Buck. He had to work, Tate. Hell, money doesn’t just float in on the tide.

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